ELISSA NADWORNY, HOST:
The Trump administration has blessed the union of two rival Hollywood titans. The Justice Department said late yesterday it has no qualms about Paramount's $111 billion bid for the much bigger Warner Bros. Discovery. The merger would tie up Paramount's movie studios with Warner's, Paramount+ with HBO and CBS with CNN. NPR's David Folkenflik has been covering this and joins us now. Hi, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Good morning, Elissa.
NADWORNY: So the Justice Department was investigating this proposed merger for how it would affect competition and consumers. What did it conclude?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, it said after a careful eight-month review that it found there would be no threat to competition within the industry, which is to say, people - you know, let's say producers or directors or actors - would they be unfairly disadvantaged because you had the combination of these two enormous studios, you know, and these television properties? And also that consumers wouldn't be adversely affected. They said no harm, no foul, and they put zero conditions on this. Often when you have major mergers, you have to spin off properties here or there. You have to make promises to the government. None of that was done here by the Justice Department's Antitrust Division.
NADWORNY: So how surprising is that?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, there's two ways to answer that question. One is, this is the biggest combination of like-with-like I can think of in the history of Hollywood. These are, you know, the - two of the last remaining enormous legacy properties in Hollywood, the studios. You've got these two major TV news divisions. You've got the two streamers. It is very much like-with-like.
And at the same time, of course, the Justice Department's antitrust regulators - as did Paramount - argued, look, we're an age of streamers. You have these digital giants. They're enormous. You have the resources behind Netflix and Apple, the world's largest digital device makers. And you've got Amazon, the everything store, doing its own with Prime Video. There is plenty of competition out there. Why would we only look at it through the narrow frame of Hollywood? So there are arguments being made for it. People thought that this was likely to happen. And at the same time, it's extraordinary.
NADWORNY: This merger would put a Trump ally in charge of CNN, which is one of the president's frequent targets in the media. I mean, did politics play a role in their approval?
FOLKENFLIK: And this is why, actually, that despite the size and magnitude of this, this was all but predicted by people analyzing this. President Trump has said, for example, that he wanted CNN in the hands of the Ellisons. Larry and David Ellison took over Paramount's parent company only just last year - Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, one of the richest people on the planet; his son, David, the founder of Skydance Media, which helped to arrange this bid for Paramount last year.
So he took over CBS. Trump has liked what he's seen. Ellison, among other things, has put Bari Weiss - a former opinion journalist, the founder of the center-right news and views site The Free Press - in charge of CBS. And there's been extraordinary level of controversy and crisis since. Trump has liked what he's seen, and therefore it was believed that his regulators would give it sort of the matador defense and green-light that puppy.
NADWORNY: OK. So with the end of the DOJ investigation, I mean, is it going to be smooth sailing for the takeover bid?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, the FCC - Federal Communications Commission - has to review it as well because there are CBS' locally owned stations that are part of the combination, and there's going to be an enormous infusion of foreign capital into this for this deal. The Saudi sovereign wealth fund is among the investors, but people expect that to go through. But you have states' attorneys general, and you also have the European Union and regulators in the United Kingdom still reviewing this. We don't know exactly what all that means. But we have seen Democratic states' attorneys general becoming much more aggressive about challenging antitrust deals like this in the courts, and that's likely where this is headed.
NADWORNY: That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Thanks, David.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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